Tuesday July 03, 2007 Multiple Threads
Phil Harman's Weblog
Tuesday July 03, 2007 A Brief History Of Solaris
A week ago I was presenting A Brief History Of Solaris at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden. My slideware is pretty minimalist (audiences generally don't respond well to extended lists of bullet points), but it should give you a flavour of my presentation style and content. For more, see Josh Simon's writeup.
My main point is that although Solaris is a good place to be because it has a consistent track record of innovation (e.g. ONC, mmap, dynamic linking, audaciously scalable SMP, threads, doors, 64-bit, containers, large memory support, zones, ZFS, DTrace, ...), the clincher is that these innovations meet in a robust package with long term compatability and support.
Linus may kid himself that ZFS is all Solaris has to offer, but the Linux community has been sincerely flattering Sun for years with its imitation and use of so many Solaris technologies. Yes, there is potential for this to work both ways, but until now the traffic has been mostly a one way street.
As a colleague recently pointed out it is worth considering questions like "what would Solaris be without the Linux interfaces it has adopted?" and "what would Linux be without the interfaces it has adopted from Sun?" (e.g. NFS, NIS, PAM, nsswitch.conf, ld.so.1, LD_*, /proc, doors, kernel slab allocator, ...). Wow, isn't sharing cool!
Solaris: often imitated, seldom bettered.
Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris, ZFS, Zones, Linux
( Jul 03 2007, 09:50:15 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [7]Post a Comment:
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data != information != knowledge != wisdom != truth
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Hi Phil,
Nice post - would there be any chance of seeing some of your speakers notes online ?
I suspect it would be really valuable to the wider audience.
Even better - how about recording / videoing it and getting that on line ?
All the best,
Wayne
Posted by Wayne Horkan on July 03, 2007 at 11:51 AM PDT #
Posted by Nico on July 03, 2007 at 03:19 PM PDT #
Posted by jl7459 on July 03, 2007 at 05:53 PM PDT #
Posted by Phil Harman on July 04, 2007 at 01:42 AM PDT #
Posted by Phil Harman on July 04, 2007 at 01:51 AM PDT #
"Psychobabble" is a bit harsh Phil - everyone who knows you (at Sun at least where I have direct experience of course) knows that you are immensely passionate about Solaris.
Given there's no notes, or any such, a number of your slides are a little dry, bare even - even with Josh Simons' write up as an accompaniment. It would have been nice for more people to get to see what your talking about.
I often have similar issues - in that presentations are supposed to hold just a bit of focused data on the slides, whilst the presenter impresses the audience with there oratory. However you can be left with slides which, without the backfilled story that goes with them, seem disjointed at best.
At least this has happened to me in the past - and I'm currently trying to capture some speakers notes for my presentations - just the bare bones that keep the presentation in context (often from the notes I collate beforehand).
Posted by Wayne Horkan on July 04, 2007 at 04:58 AM PDT #
Posted by Phil Harman on July 04, 2007 at 05:13 AM PDT #